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Support Relative Slide for 3rd party MPE synths

I've seen this mentioned twice in other posts but not as its own issue, so here it is separately:


ROLI Dashboard currently disables Relative Slide mode whenever MPE is enabled. This seems wrong. ROLI Dashboard should have a way to keep Relative Slide active when MPE mode is on. All MPE-capable synths (including Strobe2 and Cypher2) would benefit.


Relative Slide is a fundamental part of playing a Seaboard Rise — whether MPE is on or off. It seems ROLI agrees — they created a global control in Equator to turn it back on! (Through this we know it's technically feasible.) But for some reason I can't explain, every other MPE synth is currently stuck with Absolute mode. Is this an artifact from the days when Equator was the only MPE synth?


ROLI's own support article about absolute vs relative slide highlights this problem: At the end of the article, the author can offer only one kludgy workaround to get Logic Pro X to start its slide values at 0, and then admits that this only works in the positive direction. https://support.roli.com/support/solutions/articles/36000025050-slide-absolute-vs-relative


For now, I'd settle for Dashboard having a global absolute/relative slide control like Equator. But I think an ideal implementation would have the controller send to two different control parameters based on whether someone was sliding up or down. For example: have everything up from where you start pressing send CC#12 ((1-127) and everything down from where you start pressing send CC#13 (1-127). This would be infinitely more flexible while also doubling the resolution of the CC output range.


Thanks for sharing your ideas. The MPE spec was fairly recently officially approved, and we plan on releasing an update to ROLI Dashboard shortly that will support the specifications as they were adopted. From the MPE spec:


An instrument may do any of the following to assist with these difficulties: 

  1. Allow the player to choose between the Initial-position and Initial-64 schemes of interaction on the instrument itself, changing the way in which data is generated by the instrument. 

  2. Fix CC #74 to Initial-64 behavior, and designate another CC to convey the static initial position. One such implementation employs CC #75 for initial position, which simplifies the sound designer’s appropriation of CC #74. 

  3. Fix CC #74 to Initial-position behavior, and leave the MIDI transformation and manipulation questions to whatever is handling the data. 

Historically Equator has been designed to receive Slide data in MPE mode as Absolute Slide, and then based on the specific behavior desired for each preset Equator can interpret this as either Absolute Slide or Relative Slide. Note that if the instrument itself sends Relative Slide then Equator can no longer use Absolute Slide in presets that call for it. 


In any case, please stay tuned for updates to ROLI Dashboard.


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Thanks for the quick response! This is great news and information. Looking at the spec, the first and second approaches seem by far the most useful. In this context, the way Equator is handling this makes sense. Hopefully Relative Slide will soon be easy to implement on all my other MPE-capable synths.


I still encourage ROLI to implement this with an additional option to go beyond the spec, having the controller send two different control parameters based on whether someone was sliding up or down from the touch point. As mentioned above, this would be even more flexible and double the control resolution.

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